VOICE OF THE PEOPLE | Feb. 5, 2010

Give us background on nuclear issues

Don’t you think your readers would have benefited from some discussion of the substantive issues surrounding nuclear and competing technologies (price, safety and environmental impacts compared to oil and gas and coal, need for transmission lines, when building wind farms, etc.)?

They might also have benefited from your printing a little more background on Judy Pasternak, the author of the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s pieces on the nuclear industry’s lobbying.

Assuming you care, here is what appears about her on the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s web site: “Judy Pasternak is a free-lance writer based in Washington. She is currently working on a book about the toxic legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, to be published by Free Press next fall. The book, “Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos,” won the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from Columbia and the Nieman Foundation. Previously, she spent 24 years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She has won numerous prizes for investigative and environmental journalism, including the Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and the Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism.”

I suppose nuclear power does raise issues of “social justice.” I suppose the reporter’s discussion of nuclear industry lobbying techniques is of interest to readers, too. But please also try providing a little up-front disclosure of the writer’s point of view as well as giving us some substance on the issues raised by available electrical supply technology.

Bill White

Rock Hill